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John Lent
, John Lent, and Birk Sproxton in Winnipeg, 2004. Photo by Thistle2012. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.]] John Lent (born July 8, 1948) was a Canadian poet, novelist, and academic.Craig McLuckie & Ross Tyner, John Lent - Biography, Canadian Literature and Culture, Post-Colonial Web, Brown University, Web, June 4, 2012. He has been called the "Poet Laureate of the Okanagan".John Lent, Express, Okanagan Institute, Web, June 4, 2012. Life Lent was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia,Writers Union of Canada, member page for John Lent one of 7 children (Susan, Michael, Harry, Francis, Timothy, and Mary-Lou) of Adrienne (Brown) and Harry Lent. He earned a B.A. with honors in 1969, and a M.A. in 1971, from the University of Alberta (where he studied under Sheila Watson. He then pursued doctoral studies at York University, 1971-75, including field work in British Columbia, (B.C.), on Malcolm Lowry and spatial form. Lent has taught at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, and Notre Dame University College in Nelson, B.C. Starting in 1979, he has taught creative writing and literature courses at Okanagan College in Vernon, B.C.. Lent married painter Jude Clarke in 1981. He retired from the position of dean, North Okanagan Region, Okanagan College, in April 2011. He was influential in the creation of the Ryga Award for Social Responsibility in Canadian Literature,http://georgerygaaward.org/ Ryga: A journal of provocations, the Mackie Lecture and Reading Series, the Kalamalka Press, KIdsWWwrite (a creative writing ezine) and the KIWW Digital Archives, as well as several radio programs and newsprint collaborations such as The Kalamalka Chronicles. Lent’s participation in and authoring of the opening chapter of the (initially) serialised Kalamalka Chronicles, a community writing project initiated by the Sun Review newspaper and the Kalamalka Institute for Working Writers, emphasises the degree to which he experiments with narrative form and authorship. In this instance, the characters and their opening maneuvers were controlled by Lent, then re-authored and re-plotted by 8 other writers. That the ‘contest’ was quite lively and that the newspaper folded after the publication of chapter 9 is, perhaps, indicative of a community of writers rather than readers. In addition to these services to the literary arts and promotion of quality writing, Lent has engendered careers in writing through his work as a teacher and as an editor. He was a writer in residence at Sage Hill, Saskatchewan from 2009-2011.Hartig, Jean. "Sage Hill Writing Experience." Poets & Writers Magazine 38.2 (2010): 145 Lent reads his work in many cities in Canada, the United States, France, and England. He is a founding member of the Kalamalka Press, the Kalamalka Institute for working writers, and the annual Mackiehttp://www.mackiehouse.ca/writer.html Lecture and Reading series at Okanagan College. Lent is also a singer-songwriter, and played in the roots/jazz trio Lent Fraser Wall. Lent lives in Vernon, where he has finished revising a novel, The Path to Ardroe, a multi-voiced narrative set in Vernon, Strasbourg and the Scottish highlands, scheduled for publication in Spring 2012. He is also at work on a sequence of essays on consciousness and form, covering, among others, the writings of DeQuincey, Gunnars and Lowry. Other biographical information is available in Jude Clarke's The Language of Water.The Language of Water: A Woman's Struggle With Systemic Lupus Erythemotosus. Saskatoon: Thistledown, 2002. Writing Lent is an academic, essayist, poet, short story writer and musician. His work is marked by a mixing of genres that aims to produce a literary equivalent of jazz music. Lent also draws on art (especially the Impressionists) and has been influenced by the pioneering work of Joseph Frank in spatial form. A Rock Solid plays off the various senses of the term rock – geological, musical, and etymological &ndash' with emphasis on its derivation from the Old High German rucken (to cause to move). The term solid relates to the Cubist-influenced geometric structure, an insight prompted by the epigraph from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du Cubisme (1912). Combined, the “rock solid” signposts an emphasis on fluidity and stasis. The title’s indefinite article foregrounds this rock solid as one petite narrative among many; that is, the structure and sense are not a univocal, universalising “truth”. The relationship between words and painting, tied to the acoustic suggestion in the volume’s title, stress the poet’s inter-related concerns with a totality of experience. A Rock Solid “has captured a sense of experimentation with form ... It is rare in literature for a reader to have a glimpse of the poet chipping through the rock solid of experience in order to see the poem” (Meyer, 88-90).Meyer, Bruce. “Six Chapbooks.” Canadian Literature 92 (Spring 1982). 88-90. Meyer’s sole review of the book also comments on its packaging and how the reader is “sorting through a pile of debris”. This comment underlines the reader’s engagement, where sorting through the cards enforces reflection upon the experience and the reading process. Wood Lake Music continues the emphasis on landscape, but a greater sense of mood is evoked. In tune with the sense of foreboding, the narrator’s consciousness penetrates day-to-day rituals of renewal. The narrative employs a simple plot—the protagonist’s drive (from Vernon) past Kalamalka Lake, then Wood Lake, and finally Duck Lake and into Kelowna. Temporal structure runs from “Monday, September 8, 3:30pm” through “Monday, October 13, 7:00 a.m.; 1:00 p.m.” Time represents the specific chronological frame of the trips, while their incremental repetition offers an accretion of being in place. In Frieze and The Face in the Garden, Lent loosens his aesthetic through the application of lessons taken from Joseph Frank's concept, spatial form, as well as its deconstructive developments—in particular the emphasis on space/place. Reviews of Frieze have been positive. Andrew Vasius, for example, applauds Lent’s use of “end-line, internal, vowel and consonant rhyme for his own designs. The effect is not, as one might think, poetic conservatism, since he creates new forms through rhythmic change-ups, diction, caesura and sustained imagery” (110).Vasius, Andrew. "A Gambol, A Walk, and a Stroll," Waves 12(?).4. 108-110. Yet Vasius is critical of what he perceives to be “some poems that are so self-centred they leave a fleeting impression that Lent is translating experience into poetry” (110) rather than vice versa. Further to this claim, Vasius contends that the “‘how’ is exciting ... whereas the ‘what’ is often only as new and unusual as the coffee, cigarettes and booze” (110) that punctuate these poems. Christopher Wiseman differs from Vasius in Wiseman’s recognition of the regional place and the vernacular that is attendant to it: “The poems are rooted in real places, but these are turned into places of the mind, way-stations of the migrant heart, touchstones in the poet’s search for meaning. The search is intensified by the tonal range of the poetry, from the high serious to the most colloquial, blended smoothly and always at the poet’s service” (190).Wiseman, Christopher. "Limits of Feeling." Canadian Literature 105 (Summer 1985). 188-90. Michael Estok presses further, highlighting a motif in Lent’s aesthetic: "Primarily, however, Lent is an artist of the ‘negative space’ of unadorned day-to-day existence. The stress of his rhythms is clearly on the banal, rather than on the sensational ... The poet’s careful structure of imagery and his muscular tone—his powerful expression of the hypnotic rhythm of the ordinary—elicit our confidence in his ability to redeem the commonplace" (9).Estok, Michael. "Recent Poetry from Thistledown." NeWest Review (November 1985). 9. Cheryl Sutherland, in a fine, close reading of several poems, evokes the volume’s core: “he finds precision satisfying so the task he has taken upon himself is to release the petrified voices of those who have lacked the vocabulary; he fashions a frieze from their silence” (Sutherland, np).Sutherland, Cheryl. "Poet Draws on Family Memories," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, September 6, 1984. The Face in the Garden explores subjectivity by using prose and poetry to refer to external and internal states of consciousness. The author’s linguistic dexterity underscores the sense of mobility as a theme in life and in literature. The volume is, however, a transitional moment in the writer’s career. On the one hand it presents his first published stories; while, on the other, it consolidates his accomplishments as a poet. Reviews of this experimental book range from the journalistic boorishness of John MooreMoore, John. "Strange and Surreal Ways to Wave Farewell to the Summer." The Vancouver Sun, Saturday, October 19, 1991. D19. to academic criticism. Elizabeth St. Jacques, in Freelance, sees the work as the story of Peter Bendy, wherein “Boredom ... has become his companion enemy that follows him on the long search to find his own ‘face in the garden’ of life” (38).St. Jacques, Elizabeth. "Review: The Face in the Garden." Freelance (December-January 1991-92). 38 St. Jacques faults the weakness of Bendy’s character, the prose stories, that “come across as mini-lectures” and applauds the poetry, where “Lent allows his sensitivity and calm spirit to surface” (38). Professor R. G. Moyles concentrates on the title, offering an explication of “face” as many and “garden” as metaphor for life. He views “Towards the Gardens” as about “family upbringing and its emotional energy”, while “In the Gardens” and “Facing the Gardens” present “physical and psychical” (n.p.) terrain.Moyles, R. G. "Review: The Face in the Garden." SOURCE INFORMATION NEEDED (1991). 196. John Le Blanc’s review is the most considered, though readers are likely to find room for argument with his conclusion: "The shift to poetry in the last third of the work exchanges an analyzing consciousness with a verse that, in its imagistic terseness, is more coldly remote than engagingly elemental" (180).LeBlanc, John. "Male Expression." Canadian Literature 133 (Summer 1992). 179-81. While there is much to agree with in Le Blanc's piece, the shift to poetry, far from being remote, is an imagistic expression that complements the analyzing consciousness. The point is not body versus mind, but rather body and mind—a fusion and a ‘return’ to that originary garden, Eden, where humans could be. Monet's Garden is a discontinuous narrative of asymmetrical structure – an interweaving of connected stories with elliptical, interconnected pieces on the narrator of the book. The injection of a jazzy structure forcefully creates a three-dimensional literary space, perhaps at the expense of character, while in Black Horses, Cobalt Suns and Home (a poetic broadsheet, 2003), the poet opens out to societal concerns. The reviews are plentiful and consistently positive for Monet's Garden, Lent’s major prose achievement prior to the publication of So It Won't Go Away. For example, Britt Hagarty writes of the “many descriptive passages worthy of quotation” (G6).Hagarty, Britt. “Review: Monet’s Garden.” The Weekend Sun (Vancouver), Saturday, March 29, 2997. G6. Hagarty also notes that the book “succeeds powerfully at first. But its initial promise is not kept” (G6). Allan Brown perceptively parallels Monet’s Garden “both of intention and general effect, to his poetry collection Wood Lake Music”. Thematically, Brown observes: "There is some sadness in the new book with its tactful yet poignant descriptions of the ravages of alcoholism and the uncertain emotional relationships of an over-extended family. But there are moments of secure joy as well: moments, rather, that isolate, emphasize, and partly recreate a repeated joyfulness, often caught up in the perception of things."Brown, Allan. "Some Raven Tales: A Bird’s Eye View of Short Fictions from B.C.” The Antigonish Review 117. http://www.antigonish.com/review/11/brown.htm In his review of five new BC books, Brown concludes that, comparatively, “Lent has probably come closest of all these authors to what Charles Lillard ... called ‘a coming-to-terms with the landscape’—of B.C., or anywhere else.” Dallas Harrison’s observations are similar, though high praise of Lent’s descriptive power is forthcoming in Harrison’s summary of Jane’s narrative as “a crisis of selfhood in London worthy of Antoine Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea” (113).Harrison, Dallas. “Delicate Connections.” Event 26.2 (Summer 1997). 112-3. Harrison misses the point with respect to the Roof sequence when he suggests their deletion, “abstract meditations that add little to the portrait of the family” (113); however, he rightly notes that “these autobiographically influenced stories suffer somewhat from John Lent’s controlling consciousness, evident in the similarity of characters ...” (113). Valerie Compton’s review in The Edmonton Journal''Compton, Valerie. "Edmonton 1960 Evoked Here." ''Edmonton Journal, March 9, 1997. displays the inattentiveness of the reviewer, especially to the book’s structural experiment. See McLuckie's review for a contrasting perspective.http://www.postcolonialweb.org/canada/literature/lent/lentmcluckie2.html Susan Patrick’s capsule review emphasises the predominantly “psychological” nature of the stories, while also joining the chorus of reviewers who applaud Lent’s “strong sense of place that has the ability to put the reader into both the emotional and physical landscapes of his characters” (3123).Patrick, Susan. “Review: Monet’s Garden.” Canadian Book Review Annual 1997. Editor in Chief, Joyce M. Wilson. Toronto: CBCRA, 1997. 3122-3. Black Horses, Cobalt Suns: New poems is John Lent’s 6th published book, his 4th of poetry. Based on revisions to a “sonnet cycle” completed in 1995, this chapbook contains the original 12 poems reworked as 10 free verse lyrics, with a reflective “prologue”. The new edition incorporates a governing epigraph from Robert Kroetsch’s The Crow Journals (1980). “Abandonment” is the catalyst, where “People without names” is the thematic core (i.e., to exist outside the rational labelling consciousness). The question governs Lent’s investigation of self in place. Historically, the sonnet cycle has some provenance in a varied number of poems governed by an intellectual pattern. The question posed in the epigraph is that pattern, with a movement from loss and depression to a slow renewal of an expressive vision and cautious hope. For Lent, cultural critique is central to the cycle, as his “Prologue” makes clear. Lent sees the horses as a metaphor for human (dis)connectedness: “hooves thundering through the reader’s veins, racing over the planet with a passion that is out of us, sometimes turned against itself, sadly”. The second metaphor, also foregrounded in the title, is the representation of place: “In the summer here in the Okanagan ... there is a shade of cobalt blue that can be so intense it’s overwhelming, and you get this gold and silver of the sun shredding it, shattering it, burnishing it, as it goes down.” The interconnection of the horses moving out to meet the in-coming sun creates a crease, a physical epiphany that assures humanity is in the right place. So It Won't Go Away, the follow-up to Monet's Garden, dazzles with its open, looser structure, inviting the reader — as do each of Lent’s works by different means — to an engaged participation in text and in life. Devastating critiques of late capitalism, with an attendant and demonstrable human agency, bring the writer's aesthetic, calmly, quietly, forcefully to fruition. Cherie Thiessen writes that “The short stories in So It Won’t Go Away are not plot-driven narratives. Instead they flip around in time, place and point of view, incorporating first, second and third-person perspectives. Lent’s dozen stories get as close to three-dimensional writing as is possible.”Thiessen, Cherie. Review. BC Book World 2006 http://www.abcbookworld.com/view_author.php?id=3196 Paul Denham, notes the struggle a critic faces with the book and labels but also sees that struggle as an impediment “from its real emotional power of a story (or series of stories, if you prefer) about the joy and pain of being a family.”MLA: Denham, Paul. Future of the Family. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 20 Dec. 2011. 2 reviews in The Globe and Mail concentrate on structure and theme. Wiersema places emphasis on structure: “Interestingly, the creator never creates a position of privilege for himself; his story is as fictive, and as truthful-feeling, as the “bigger, impossible story” of the Connelly siblings, and becomes another strand in the complex and utterly winning tale Lent is spinning.”Robert J. Wiersema, Review Globe & Mail, March 11, 2006 While Sandborn offers a thematic overview: “The book works both as a straightforward story of family pain, addiction, love and redemption, and as a highly intelligent meditation on the process of writing itself.”Tom Sandborn, Review, Globe & Mail, AUGUST 26, 2006 Lengthier analyses of Lent's work are found in Craig McLuckie's “Improvisation of Self and Other in John Lent’s Developing Aesthetic”,The Prairies: Lost and Found. (edited by Len Kuffert. Winnipeg: St. John’s College Press, 2007. 113-130.which offers coverage of the published work (excluding songs) up to Black Horses, Cobalt Suns, and the book length conversation on writing conducted with Robert Kroetsch, Abundance,http://www.kalwriters.com/abundance.html which offers significant insight to Lent's creative praxis generally and to So It Won't Go Away specifically. Kootenay writer Angie Abdou, reviewing the book, remarks " In Abundance, readers are immersed in an intimate conversation between two greats of Canadian literature — great teachers, great writers, great minds."http://www.abdou.ca/litpicks/litpicks_abundance.html Recognition His last book, So It Won't Go Away (2005, a sequel to his 1996 story sequence Monet's Garden), was shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes' 2006 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Kalamalka Press gives an annual John Lent Poetry/Prose award, which judges chapbook-length works of poetry, short fictions or hybrids thereof, submitted by writers in the early stages of their writing careers, having not published more than 2 full-length books. The winning chapbook is published in a limited fine-press edition by Kalamalka Press.Kalamalka Press is excited to announce the third annual John Lent Poetry-Prose Award!, Kalamalka Press. Web, June 21, 2014. Publications Poetry *''A Rock Solid''. Toronto:Dreadnought, 1978. *''Wood Lake Music''. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 1982. *''Frieze''. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown Press, 1984. *''The Face in the Garden''. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown Press, 1990. *''Monet's Garden''. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown Press, 1996. *''Black Horses, Cobalt Suns: New poems''. Victoria, BC: Greenboathouse Books, 2000. *''So It Won't Go Away''. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown Press, 2005. *''Cantilevered Songs''. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown Press, 2009. *''The Path to Ardroe''. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-927068-01-4 Non-fiction *"Schizophrenic Patterns in the Plays of T.S. Eliot" (master's thesis). University of Alberta, 1971. *''Abundance: The Mackie House conversations about the writing life'' (with Robert Kroetsch). Vernon, BC: Kalamalka Press, 2007. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:John Lent, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 9, 2014. Audio / video *''Shadow Moon'' (with the Lent/Fraser/Wall Trio), 2005. See also *List of Canadian poets References Notes External links ;Books *John Lent at Amazon.com ;About *Author profile: John Lent, Thistledown Press *John Lent at the Post-Colonial Web *John Lent Official website *[http://www.abdou.ca/litpicks/litpicks_cantilevered.html review of Cantilevered Songs] *[http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/08/03/book-review-the-path-to-ardroe-by-john-lent/ Open Book: The Path to Ardoe, by John Lent] reviewed at the National Post Category:1948 births Category:2006 deaths Category:Canadian poets Category:Canadian singer-songwriters Category:Canadian jazz musicians Category:20th-century poets Category:Poets Category:English-language poets Category:Canadian songwriters Category:Songwriters Category:Canadian academics